Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- A note on fonts
- List of abbreviations and conventions
- 1 What is writing?
- 2 The basic options: meaning and sound
- 3 Signs of words
- 4 Signs of syllables
- 5 Signs of segments
- 6 Consonants and vowels
- 7 Vowel incorporation
- 8 Analysis and interpretation
- 9 Mixed systems
- 10 History of writing
- 11 Psycholinguistics of writing
- 12 Sociolinguistics of writing
- Appendix: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 1
- Bibliography
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
5 - Signs of segments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- A note on fonts
- List of abbreviations and conventions
- 1 What is writing?
- 2 The basic options: meaning and sound
- 3 Signs of words
- 4 Signs of syllables
- 5 Signs of segments
- 6 Consonants and vowels
- 7 Vowel incorporation
- 8 Analysis and interpretation
- 9 Mixed systems
- 10 History of writing
- 11 Psycholinguistics of writing
- 12 Sociolinguistics of writing
- Appendix: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 1
- Bibliography
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
Summary
The powers of letters, when they were applied to a new language, must have been vague and unsettled, and therefore different hands would exhibit the same sound by different combinations.
Samuel JohnsonAur prezent english langweij iz inefisient, autdated, deflated, irregular, feilurcawzing, distorted, regressiv, retardant, and often repulsiv!
Internasional Union For KanadanEach natural language has a finite number of phonemes (or letters in its alphabet) and each sentence is representable as a finite sequence of these phonemes (or letters).
Noam Chomsky, Syntactic StructuresQuestion: What is an agnostic dyslexic insomniac?
Answer: Someone who lies awake all night worrying about the existence of dog.
This is an alphabetic pun. People who do speak English but do not write it much never laugh when they hear it. It plays with the interchangeability of letters that, with an alphabetically trained ear, you can ‘hear’ – or is it ‘see’? It is English spelling that makes us perceive one word as the reverse of another, that is, as the same sequence of segments turned backwards. Segments, more specifically phonemic segments, are, it is widely believed, what alphabetic letters encode. However, alphabetic writing has been cited as evidence both for the psychological reality of segments (Cohn 2001: 198) and for the view that segments are a mere projection (Morais et al. 1979). The argument cuts either way. How would it be possible to encode speech as a sequence of discrete graphical elements (letters) unless there were corresponding units in the mental representation of language?
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- Writing SystemsAn Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis, pp. 89 - 108Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002